There is a certain self-contradiction in your post - there is no question that without nukes Putin would end up in the same place as Saddam Hussein. And indeed that the Ukraine invasion couldn't have happened if they had had nukes (although what happens through the Ukrainian revolution is unclear - maybe the Russians would just have invaded then). The way war and peace have worked out over the last 70 years has making it quite clear that nuclear disarmament is unilateral suicide.
Strategists across Asia are identifying that they need nukes to hold off, in no particular order, India, China and the US.
> There is a certain self-contradiction in your post
I agree, there is. I am well aware of the Budapest memorandum, and in another comment I may have said something like "If Ukraine teaches us anything, it's to never give up your nukes."
This still does not resolve the issue from the POV which an alien observer might experience. From that POV, you have a species which sits on the edge of self-annihilation. The replies here seem to indicate that this will be an unsolvable problem, forever. I still hope otherwise. So maybe I am a actually "hippie" in this regard.
In any case, I should have qualified my OP much more.
Russia would not unleash all their nukes on the US, unless they want to be "pacified" by China afterwards. It would not bomb China and the US at the same time, unless they want to be the target of both of them, and maybe the UK and France too.
The US answer to a Russian or Chinese attack would not be an all-out nukefest, because nukes will continue to be needed for deterrence.
The far more likely nuclear war scenario is one where there is a limited initial engagement. After which, people from major metropolitan areas will move away, or prepare for rapid evacuation if the need comes.
I'd venture to say that a nuclear war (including strategic nukes exchanges) would result in fewer deaths worldwide than Covid-19.
>"The replies here seem to indicate that this will be an unsolvable problem, forever."
I can imagine that in a very long term people might evolve to the point of not needing to kill each other. But as it stands now every country is more than willing to commit murders at scale to achieve their goals assuming they're reasonably safe from "proper payback" or big economic losses.
What drives me nuts about the current situation is that the power over nuclear annihilation currently rests in the hands of a number of people who could be fit into a small hotel.
This is one of the few benefits of the centralization of power which we currently experience. You really just need a few hundred people to reach this consensus.
We may never be in a better place in history to solve this problem as we are in today.
That is decidedly not the case. Even dictator is backed by a decent numbers of allies within his country, and he will need to get their agreement to actually do the disarmament, even if he already agreed to outside parties.
And in country like China (authoritarian but not quite dictator yet), the top guy is backed by a huge power pyramid, there are tens of thousands of politicians and strategists funnel their plans and ideas upward for discussions.
The good news is that it goes both way too: even dictator can’t unilaterally decide to go ham and nukes everywhere. Sure, nuke your direct enemy is still an option, but anything more than that, or risks escalation more than that will probably be hard to be decided by just one or few guys. If you want to be optimistic, just realize that any time in the past where things might go wrong, actual human beings had stepped up to prevent fullscale nuclear war to happen. From Bayesian point of view, the odd is still on our side.
I know that tactical nuke could be unfortunately escalated to larger scale, but then again, this needs people to agree to escalate in some sense. And there is still the obvious Murphy’s law of anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But we are trying to be optimistic, aren’t we?
> there is no question that without nukes Putin would end up in the same place as Saddam Hussein.
Speaking of Saddam, was our invasion of Iraq any more justified than Putin's invasion of Ukraine?
Because the moralizing propaganda being shoveled down our throat every day is nauseating. I guess I understand why it would work on people under 25, but I see too many adults who should know better swallowing the party line completely.
Strategists across Asia are identifying that they need nukes to hold off, in no particular order, India, China and the US.